In her Beijing
lectures, Melissa Bowerman presents a lucid introduction and account of her
research on a range of topics: how children acquire the semantics of spatial
terms, how they construct categories and acquire the semantics of nouns, and
how they master the semantics of verbs in early language acquisition. Bowerman also covers the learning of argument
structure and expressions of end-state, with special attention to the adult
speech that guides children, and hence also the role of typology in
acquisition; how cross-linguistic variation affects, for example, how speakers
represent ‘cutting’ and ‘breaking’ in different languages, and the relation of
the Whorfian Hypothesis to cross-linguistic variations in the semantics of
languages. Bowerman’s over-riding
concern throughout is with how children come to master the first language being
spoken to them by their parents and caregivers.